Whatsapp is a widely used messaging application owned by Facebook. Originally it was sharing text only but later on, they added some interesting features of video/audio calling. Currently, it is not just a messaging application, we can share text, audio, pdf, Docx, images, etc. Thus, it becomes a necessity to every phone user.
Whatsapp has 105 billion active users. Thus, WhatsApp has to deal with a heterogeneous amount of data each day. One of the issues that have been troubling WhatsApp has been misinformation. In countries like India, some messaging applications including WhatsApp, have been called out several times to deal with security and forwarding fake news. There is an undeniable fact that WhatsApp is trying hard to cope up with this scenario. Whatsapp has rolled out some features aimed at slowing the spread of fake news.
Look for the ‘Forwarded’ tag: The first and foremost rule to identify a fake message is to look for a Forwarded tag along with the message. Which means a message is widely spreaded by someone. This indicates the particular message has been sent by 1 user to another using more than 5 times. Thus, this message is not written by the person who sent it. Without knowing the origin of news we should not believe it.
Fact check service: If you find some news suspected you can use a service named fact-checking service to check whether the news is correct or not.
Boom - +91 7700906588
India Today - +91 7370007000
How do I check?
- Save these two contacts in your phone directory
- Send suspected images and videos to these numbers
- After some time, you will get the results
- Results will come with the tag TRUE and FALSE
- You can check the truth by clicking the given truth
Check forwarded photos and media carefully: Most of the time we received edited or wrong images and videos. Do check on trusted news sites before forwarding it to others.